I'm fascinated by this 'what(ever) it is', Alison.
It starts from an almost Tennysonian place, the bees as 'perpetual as
meadows asleep in the brooding sun' but navigates from there to a somewhere
much harsher, almost like MacDiarmid's Raised Beach, to the bloodless unlife
of rock and the panoramic violence of galaxies. For a little poem it has an
enormous amount impacted within it, I like the lyric 'I's' edgy awareness of
the citizens, for instance. It has a definite melancholy, I think, but it
doesn't depress, because its acts of articulation, of speech-finding in a
world that has grown hostile to speech, that belongs to the wolf-siblings,
are its desperate positives, its saving graces found.
I love 'too shy to compare fingerprints' btw, that's a gem.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
www.paintstuff.20m.com/index.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 4:46 AM
Subject: Poem
> I don't know what this is, but I wrote it anyway -
>
> Best
>
> A
>
> there bees were perpetual as meadows asleep in a brooding sun
> or a curlew recalled as a mirror of all sadness
>
> no one could tell if it was day or night
> they always slept on the silk of their delusions
> wherever they fell
> in the dust of libraries or among the soft
> vegetations of sensual musings
>
> no one was certain either of borders
> and therefore the citizens were courteous to strangers
> perpetually puzzled by familiarities
> as if they were siblings raised in the same hayfield
> or perhaps cousins suckled on the same wolf
> as if the face before them chimed
> like bells on an alien planet
>
> they were too shy to compare fingerprints
> it could have been that each whorl matched exactly
> and so their harmonic voices
> drifted through the grasses like a cloud of questions
> waking lizards and beetles from innocence
> and flowers hastening after rain
>
> but every now and then a citizen would wake
> with a phrase in her head that she couldn't explain
> and found the libraries were silent
>
> then she would walk through the humming streets
> past refineries and docklands beyond the knowledge of cities
> until she found a rock inhabited by no voice
> perched on a mountain without history
> and there she would breathe an air without language
> pure and violent as a galaxy
>
> and only then would the veins in her feet
> tell how cold the ground was and how bloodless
>
> how unlike death
> which laboured hotly in those other cities
> she saw teeming beneath the torn sky
> so far from the home she could never return to
> now that it never existed
>
>
> --
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Home page
> http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
> Masthead
> http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
>
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